Hilary's Desk

Sitting back watching the medical and political system defending Gardasil is quite amusing. First, the usual bloggers who fall under the “anti the anti-vaccine people” catagory, take uneducated speculative ranting swipes (and I’m not providing URLs because their ignorance is worse than their insolence), and then, as usual, the media doesn’t understand the significance of this issue. Either that, or they have been told to shut up. None of them lived through the polio/SV40 debacle, and ants have longer institutional memory than journalists living under high pressure situations where the motto is “write, present and forget”.

Part of what they face are the fairy-wands or bulldust waved by manufacturers and government officials, to try to persuade journalists not to run the story. After all, most journalists have no idea that this is the latest in a long history of vaccine contaminants. The manufacturers’ and authorities’ intent, is that journalists will think the issue a big yawn, and not put pen to paper (“Mustn’t scare the public, eh?!” Pass the bean dip, please...). Continue Reading

All New Zealand samples contaminated.

A few days ago, an American organisation put on their website a copy of a letter sent to the FDA, in which they stated that thirteen samples of Gardasil from Poland, France, Spain, USA, New Zealand and Australia, made in four different Merck factories (USA, Holland, France and CSL Australia) had been tested, and found to contain genetically engineered dna fragments which the purification process failed to remove. Yesterday, a more detailed press release was put onto SANE-Vax's site, which showed samples contaminated with HPV DNA 11 and 18. The New Zealand results can be seen here.

One of the genetically engineered particles found is said to be a genetically engineered syntheticaly constructed gene designed to instruct the yeast or baculovirus cells, to make the HPV-11 outer capsid protein (virus-like particles) for the Gardasil vaccine.

This is the Pubmed site for GenBank Locus SCU55993, which is the picture below, of ONE of the alleged contaminants:

Wavy lines mean nothing to me, and probably nothing to you.

SANE-vax's letter doesn't specifically say what the other contaminants are, but say that the rest of their proof is available for review provided that FDA provides " appropriate safeguards ... to protect the proprietary processes and information utilized by our laboratory to test the samples."

Are the "genetically altered HPV DNA fragments" a big deal?

It's always interesting hearing why someone might want to help the movie industry scare the pants off people. In this Salon article, World Health Organisation employee, Dr Ian Lipkin tells why he vetted scripts, character acting, and why he ran around the set of "Contagion" for days on ending, making sure everything was "just right".

Of course his focus is promoting acceptance of vaccination to the point where he coaches an actress (Jennifer Ehle) in self vaccination techniques. Presumably he hopes all the participants of contagion are now vaccination acolytes.

On 29th August, I wrote a blog about a blog discussing a doctor in Sweden who found arsenic in the Swine Flu vaccine. An astute reader reminded me of a 2009 finding, reported in Science Daily (pdf) informing readers that arsenic exposure, compromised the immune system when it came to swine flu:

"The ability to mount an immune response to influenza A (H1N1) infection is significantly compromised by a low level of arsenic exposure that commonly occurs through drinking contaminated well water, scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) and Dartmouth Medical School have found. Continue Reading